Martha Rhodes
Them All
You must resist my calls, urgent as they sound,
for I will call you, rouse you, easy sleeper.
You should not follow or evenly step with me…
Daniel Brennan
The Fire Road
Another path yields
when you press your hand into his chest
You ache in the vehicle’s front seat,
body full with the sound of snapping bird wings…
Shome Dasgupta
Dhoti Blaze
mud splashed: teeth and truck,
a grind and growl—we watch
the world and rev the engine.
a spattered sky—churned air,
for a moment: a trip overseas,
time traveling to our childhood…
Abbie Doll
nature’s one pesky burrito
we ditch the snow-caked grand canyon / like a cigarette butt flicked aside / our windburnt skin / still smolderin’ / with the might-as-well-be-waterless crevice / outta sight / outta mind / no view
in the rearview / this wooly mammoth landmark / this gaping geological yawn…
Charles Douthat
Carolyn
Not yet of two minds that raw hospital afternoon
when the decade-long charade of my sister’s diabetes
as explanation for everything difficult and strange
happening to her…
Karen Hildebrand
Review: “It Will Have Been So Beautiful” by Amanda Shaw
Where to begin when your topics span an impossibly wide range, from self and family to environmental disaster and climate change? If you’re Amanda Shaw, you jump right in and introduce it all within your first six poems (Section I, “What They Said it Was”), creating a map of where your reader will travel…
Justin Lacour
A Marriage
In this poem there is the man the woman and the snake also the garden and God walks through the garden in the cool of the day the woman talks to God the woman cannot talk to the man the woman has questions the man does not have questions the man thinks about the place between the woman’s legs…
Emily Light
Pastoral with Bruxism and Keats
Look, I’m not living
poetry. That panting
is just the dog and no one
has ever called
me their lover…
Sara Quinn Rivara
Names of the Virgin Mary
Our Lady of Perpetual Vigor, of the Algae Choked Pond; Our
Lady of Trying Too Hard, of Blue Sparkle Eyeshadow, of Magenta
Lipstick; Our Lady the Two Dollar Whore, of Is This Okay or Not, Is
This Love Or–; Our Lady of Fat Orange Cats…
Angela Arnold
The House Knows
…Always he stands there, she points:
and obediently he waits for it
to vanish, disperse into the now foreign quiet.
She pauses herself,
her still pointing finger sinking, slowly, expecting.
He feels a tug then, of something, at something…
Marisa P. Clark
I Assign Maggie Smith’s “Good Bones” in Poetry Class
—and in one response, a student conducts research
the way so many students do: a hasty banging
at computer keys or thumbing of a smartphone screen.
I giggle as I read. The student has identified
the writer of “Good Bones” as the Dame
and Oscar-winning elderly white Brit…
Lauren Davis
My Mind is a Regret
After Sylvia Plath
There will be enlightenment,
cold berries which make my teeth ache,
a dark cat stalking a lethargic wasp…
Alexa Doran
a student asks if it’s about Grief
…I believed so many things about myself. about dragging men into graveyards to kiss them. about dreamsicle martinis mucousing the counter. I thought love had outlines everyone could see…
Taylor Franson-Thiel
Addendum to Being a Daughter
…She gave
birth to me under a full moon and torn
Stratocumulus and I’ve been tiding away
from her since. She taught me indignant
symphonies, how to let sharp notes sing…
Jill Klein
Proof
I peel an orange
for pithy hints. You holster
my abandonment…
Suzanne Langlois
Loose
Despite everything I knew about what happens
to loose dogs, I let my first dog run loose at night.
It’s what my father had done when I was a kid.
Husky-wolf mix—I’m lucky she wasn’t shot.
She’s luckier. I don’t know what I thought…
Sam Moe
Thinking Again
In the bird room again, scared, knife in hand, there’s something wrong with the pelicans, the way the pigeons turn pale blue when you enter the room, how many times do we have to do this…